highroad from Aberdeen to Banff traversing the parish. New Machar was wanting, on the whole, in the breezy highland charm of the early home at Strachan. The social life was simple but intellectually stagnant. Among the infrequent visitors at the manse I find incidental mention in Reid’s letters of one. He tells that he made the acquaintance of the well-known Jacobite, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, 'by his lodging a night in my house at New Machar,' when he was in the Prince’s army, on his way to Culloden; perhaps when he was in Lord George Murray’s division, which retreated through Aberdeenshire in February 1746, or in one of the detachments which were in motion around New Machar in the preceding December.
The Thomas Reid who is revealed to us in his books does not promise pulpit eloquence likely to interest this rustic population. Like Bishop Butler when he was in his remote rectory at Stanhope a few years before, he was pondering the chief intellectual work of his life in exile from intellectual society. None of Reid’s sermons are found among his manuscripts. Indeed, it appears that his characteristic modesty and diffidence, combined, it is said, with some neglect of literary culture in his early education, induced him at first to read to his rustic audience the sermons of eminent Anglican preachers, instead of compositions of his own—thus adopting a practice afterwards recommended by Paley, by which, with fit selection, many audiences might benefit in this age of social pressure. 'As to preaching,' says Paley, 'if your situation requires a sermon every Sunday, make one and find five.' Tillotson and the Nonconformist Evans are mentioned as Reid’s favourites, and something is said about Samuel Clarke. The luminous good sense of Tillotson, and the reverential temper of Evans,
